Facts about Gary Speed

Who was Gary Speed and what had he done throughout his life and football career? This is the question that we are going to answer in this article, however, this is not the only question that we are aiming to provide an answer for by the end of this article.

Gary Speed had played in many great teams like Leeds United and Everton and even had coached his national team before his tragic death, that is the kind of information that you would get if you search his name in google or other search engines. Facts about Gary Speed are very rare to come across, it has been a lot of years since his last appearance on the field.

He announced that he was going to fill in his retirement papers in 2009, but he didn’t put football aside and came back to take the lead of his beloved team, Sheffield United. It seemed that his life was very stable and that he was enjoying it but very soon the disturbing news came in and people were informed that Gary Speed committed suicide by hanging himself.

We have provided much more information about the mentioned event which you are going to read later on in this article but for now, let us get to some of his basic information and statistics of his personal life and professional career.

If you want to read more about the likes of Gary Speed, we would offer you two of our finest articles, which are

and

to entertain yourself and expand your football knowledge.

Everything you need to know of the facts about Gary Speed

Let us get to his information to give you a quick overview of who Gary Speed was.

Personal information

• Full name

  : Gary Andrew Speed

• Date of birth

  : September 8, 1969

• Place of birth

  : Mancot, Flintshire, Wales

• Age

  : 42

• Date of death

  : November 27, 2011

• Cause of death

  : Suicide

• Star sign

  : Virgo

• Marital status

  : Married

• Religion

  : Christianity

Football information

• Nickname

  : Mr. Versatility

• Last team

  : Sheffield United

• Position

  : Midfielder

Body measurement and appearance

• Height

  : 1.78 m

• Weight

  : 66 kg

• Ethnicity

  : White

• Hair color

  : Black

• Eye color

  : Brown

Now that you have general information about this legend let us introduce him more by taking a brief look at Gary Speed early life, football, and managerial career in the next part of facts about Gary Speed.

Gary Speed early life and career details

Gary Andrew Speed was born on September 8, 1969. Gary Speed parents were Roger and Carol Speed. He has a sister, who is Lesley. He was studying at Hawarden High School and was a huge fan of Everton.

He was working as a paperboy to earn his money and also played for Flintshire Schoolboys and Aston Park Rangers. He also liked to play cricket and was a huge fan of golf, due to the fact that he would’ve spent hours playing cricket and golf in his backyard.

Club

He started his career from

. He was developing his skills as a trainee at the club. He signed a deal with the team on June 13, 1988. He usually took the left-back position in those years. He earned his first cap in a match against Oldham Athletic.

He finally moved to his beloved club, the one that he had dreams of joining when he was a child. He signed a 3.5-million-pound contract with Everton in 1996. He managed to score his first and last hat trick in November against

. Playing for the team for 2 years and he got offered a new contract from Newcastle United and he moved on without hesitation.

In July 2004 it was announced that Gary Speed would be joining Bolton wanderers. Holding the record of being the first players who earned 500 caps in the premier league, He played for four years for this team.

And finally, he moved to the team that was the last one before his retirement, Sheffield United. Making his first appearance for the team on New Years' Eve of 2008, he casually accepted the role of captaincy for the team for the times that Chris Morgan wasn’t around. He was in the starting eleven almost every time.

He announced his retirement after playing for 2 years in Sheffield United. After this, he decided to change his career from a football one to a managerial career.

International and managerial

Considering Gary Speed nationality, he played for Wales and actually coached it for a year. he started his international career from a very young age, making 3 appearances for Under-21 team.  By the total amount of 85 appearances he was the second top cap player after Neville Southall. After his retirement, he was one of the best choices to be the manager of his national team since he perfectly knew how the team works.

Except for the management of Wales, He had also coached one other team which was the last one he played in as a player, 

. He got involved with some controversies right off the bat, starting whit a one-game touchline ban.

He managed the team for 4 months until he was announced as the manager of the 

. He didn’t succeed in achieving any kinds of world-class trophies throughout his managerial career.

Now that we took a short glimpse of his career let’s get to the main titles of 

facts about Gary Speed

.

Gary Speed personal life and tragic death

Gary Speed was the father of two, Thomas and Edward.  He has been married since 1996 to Louise. His son Edward followed his father’s path and had been chosen for the Wales Under-16 squad.

Let us get to the saddest turn in the facts about Gary Speed, which shook the world and his family as they were not expecting to see Gary's life end like that.

To talk about his tragic death, there are a lot of rumors which are not confirmed to this day but we are going to stick with the explanation which seems to be the most logical one for Gary’s suicide. Everything was going well and seemed that Gary was living a joyful life beside his family but it was only the façade.

Gary had never spoken about his problems before, even the day before the accident everything seemed normal. He was featured on BBC One in the Football focus program on November 26, 2011, and even the co-guest Dan Walker described Gary as being in a fine form. The rest of the day went as normal for Gary, he chatted with a few experts and took a walk to the stadium where he watched a movie with his friends.

But the day after that right near 7 am, his wife found Gary’s body hanging from the garage's ceiling. She immediately called the police and the ambulance but it was already late and Gary had passed away. Police reported it as a suicide but it was suspicious since there had been no problems in Gary’s life.

As his mother says “If you don’t know the reason why it happened you are never at peace. We didn’t know there was anything wrong with Gary.

You never recover from anything like this. Never. It’s the biggest shock anyone could ever experience.” It was indeed a huge shock to his family and his fans. Even his childhood friend was unaware of Gary Speeds' problems. He told the interviewers that he was feeling disappointed that he didn’t earn Gary’s trust so he could talk with him about his problems.

Later on, it was confirmed that his youth coach Barry Bennerll was in fact a serial child sex offender. Gary never talked about it but there were some witnessed that had confessed that Gary had been the victim of this child predator.

His family had a hard time dealing with Gary Speeds sudden death, to the point that his wife had to become an alcoholic in order to numb the pain of Gary’s absence. His children, in the same manner, had a hard time living their life without their father.

After his death, and the announcement of this news by the Football Association of Wales, many football stars such as Alan Shearer, Michel Platini, and Ed Miliband sent their condolences to the Speed family.

The whole match of

and Aston Villa was dedicated to Gary Speed since it started a few hours after the announcement of his death.

Rumor around Gary Speed death

When we talk about the facts about Gary Speed it is optimal to cover all the aspects of his life and things that have been said about him but yet need to be confirmed.

As said before, none of this has been confirmed until today, that does make sense since they are called “rumors”. We are going to review some of them, the ones that are pretty common to come across while you do simple research about the cause of Gary Speed's death.

The first and most common one is that Gary was suffering from depression for a long time, and if you have read about depression you would know that people who are depressed don’t like to talk about their problems and are adamant to solve their issues by themselves, this explains why nobody expected Gary to commit suicide since he was keeping all of his problems secret.

There was a Twitter attack on the posts related to Gary Speed's cause of death, on which numerous people claimed that Gary was having a gay affair, which he couldn’t talk about because he was already married and was the father of two. But later on, Gary Speeds' brother-in-law shed some light on the issue clarifying that Garry was not Gay nor was having an affair.

There are also rumors about Gary trying to talk to his wife but her ignorance was the cause that left Gary with no choice other than to see himself at the end of the line. His brother-in-law posted a tweeter saying that four days before his death Gary had admitted that he was going to take his own life. But yet again his wife was too ignorant towards the issue to pay attention to Gary’s problems.

Gary Speed funeral

Many people attended his funeral including his family members, his close friend, and his teammates. That made a total of 250 people who were present at his funeral. To his wife’s demand, only a small group of people were allowed to gather on the main road outside St Deiniol’s Church.

Gary Speed net worth and salary

It has always been the fun part of these kinds of articles to read about the net worth of a celebrity and compare all that they have to other celebrities’ properties or even your own. Well in this part of facts about Gary Speed we are going to talk about his real estate and properties.

It is estimated if Gary Speed was still playing until today, it would have cost a lot of money to purchase him. Gary had 1.5 million pounds of an estate when he passed away, leaving all of it to his family. Although the amount of money that he was getting paid is still mastery. His house was put up for sale in 2014 by his wife, Louise. It was sold at its original price which is 1.3 million pounds in 2016.

It was said that she wanted to sell the house because she couldn’t handle the memories of Gary living in the house. “The home held a lot of memories but she could no longer carry on living there.” As told a journalist to The Sun of Sunday. Gary bought the house at the price of 1.3 million pounds. The house is quite big, it has a swimming pool, a tennis court, and six bedrooms.

Gary renovated the house, spending thousands of pounds to give it a new look. There is no information about his exact net worth by the time that

facts about Gary Speed

 article are being written.

Gary Speed quotes

The first quote that we have prepared for you is related to one of the aspects of Gary Speeds' personality, devotion. “I don't like the showy nationalism - a tattoo, wrapping yourself in a flag - that doesn't matter to me. The way to show your patriotism and commitment is to go and support or play for your team.”

He openly disagreed to show his devotion by metaphorical acts and symbolism. He instead preferred to put all of the energy he had to play for his team.

As to talk about his patriotic side, he was a man of his country, he was proud to be Welsh. Although is a pretty small country but its people are very proud to be born in it. As he said once, “Everyone I know is fervently proud to be Welsh but you try not to be preachy about it.

It's difficult at times. But when I go home to north Wales, or to somewhere I've never been in South Wales, I still feel at home because I'm in Wales. It's hard to explain.” He was not like any other athletes who forget their nationality as soon as they get to fame and money.

“If I had my time again and was able to change one thing from my career then I wouldn't have retired. I would have played for Wales longer.” You can see that he regretted retiring since he wanted to play longer for his national team. He was a good player and he could accomplish many other things in his professional career if he had continued playing for his national team.

His teammates would have welcomed him as he was so loved by his teammates.

We hope that you are enjoying the facts about Gary Speed's article so far. We would appreciate it so much if you could share this article with your friends so they could read about Gary Speed and expand their football knowledge.

Gary Speed was very proud that he was given the honor to coach his national team. He demonstrated his patriotism in various quotes, here is one of them: “If you've got aspirations to be a manager or coach, obviously coaching your country would be a great honor.” It is just so sad to see that a man with this much inspiration and motivation decided to take his life.

We need more people with this kind of personality and devotion.

Now for the last section of

facts about Gary Speed

, we are going to take a look at his achievements and accomplishment both individually and as a team.

Gary Speed honors

To mention first, he wasn’t successful in achieving any kind of international trophies, which is a huge letdown considering he had a huge potential in managing his national team but difficulties got to him.

In his youth days, he was part of Leeds United when his team managed to obtain the league title in 1991-92 in the first division and 1989-90 in the second division.

In 2 consecutive years, Newcastle United managed to become second in the FA Cup tournament.

As for his awards, his name was among the players that got chosen for the PFA Team of the year in 1992-93 season for

.

To finish facts about Gary Speed article up, his death had a meaning after all. His death persuaded a lot of parents to talk to their children often and influenced a lot of families to share their problems with each other to prevent such an incident. 

Read more

Follow 

 for the